🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com
Want baskets full of crisp, healthy cucumbers all season long? 🥒 In this video, you'll discover the **old Amish-inspired gardening methods** that help cucumber plants grow stronger, stay healthier, and produce far more fruit using simple, time-tested techniques.
Whether you're growing cucumbers in a garden bed, raised bed, or containers, these practical tips can help you increase your harvest naturally—without relying on expensive products.
📌 In this video, you'll learn:
* How to encourage continuous cucumber production
* The best watering and mulching techniques
* Simple soil secrets for healthier plants
* Common mistakes that reduce your harvest
* Easy ways to keep vines productive all season
These traditional gardening practices are easy to follow, beginner-friendly, and can make a noticeable difference in your cucumber harvest.
👍 If you enjoyed this video, don't forget to **Like**, **Subscribe**, and turn on notifications for more gardening tips, Amish-inspired growing methods, and self-sufficiency ideas.
#Cucumbers #Gardening #VegetableGarden #Amish #GardeningTips #GrowYour
Want baskets full of crisp, healthy cucumbers all season long? 🥒 In this video, you'll discover the **old Amish-inspired gardening methods** that help cucumber plants grow stronger, stay healthier, and produce far more fruit using simple, time-tested techniques.
Whether you're growing cucumbers in a garden bed, raised bed, or containers, these practical tips can help you increase your harvest naturally—without relying on expensive products.
📌 In this video, you'll learn:
* How to encourage continuous cucumber production
* The best watering and mulching techniques
* Simple soil secrets for healthier plants
* Common mistakes that reduce your harvest
* Easy ways to keep vines productive all season
These traditional gardening practices are easy to follow, beginner-friendly, and can make a noticeable difference in your cucumber harvest.
👍 If you enjoyed this video, don't forget to **Like**, **Subscribe**, and turn on notifications for more gardening tips, Amish-inspired growing methods, and self-sufficiency ideas.
#Cucumbers #Gardening #VegetableGarden #Amish #GardeningTips #GrowYour
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00There is a strange thing about cucumbers that I have watched play out in gardens my whole life.
00:05Two people can plant the very same seed, in the very same month, in ground that is near enough the
00:12same.
00:12And one of them will get three or four sorry cucumbers off a plant and give up on the whole
00:18business.
00:19And the other will be carrying cucumbers to the neighbors in a bushel basket,
00:24begging folks to take them off his hands, picking more than his family can eat.
00:29Same seed, same weather, same dirt.
00:32And the whole difference between those two gardeners is not luck.
00:37It is knowing a handful of plain things that nobody ever taught the first fellow.
00:43Now the thing you see, when your cucumber plant gives you a few small fruits
00:48and then sulks and yellows and quits by the middle of the summer,
00:52is that you think you have a bad plant, or bad soil, or bad luck.
00:56But that is not the real trouble.
00:59The real trouble is that a cucumber is a peculiar creature with a few hard rules built into it.
01:06And if you break those rules, it will punish you.
01:09And if you keep them, it will pour out fruit like it cannot help itself.
01:14It is one of the most generous plants in all the garden, once you understand what it is asking of
01:20you.
01:21My name is Elias Yoder.
01:23I farm a piece of ground here in Lancaster County in Pennsylvania that my family has worked since 1838.
01:31And I am going to give you five plain things today,
01:34the same five my grandfather gave me when I was a boy standing in his cucumber patch,
01:40that will take you from a few sorry cucumbers to more than you can carry.
01:45I can see that patch of his yet.
01:48He grew his cucumbers up on strings, and of a morning before the dew was off,
01:53he would send me down the rows with a basket.
01:56And he had one rule that he would repeat every single time until it was worn into me.
02:02Take every one you can find, he would say.
02:06Do not leave the big one to get bigger.
02:08And do not come back and tell me you found them all, because you did not.
02:13I thought he was just being hard on a boy.
02:16I understand now he was teaching me the one thing that decides whether a cucumber patch
02:22feeds you all summer or quits on you in July.
02:26He was not fussing over a basket.
02:28He was saving the whole crop, and he was doing it through me.
02:33Before I go on, I will say this once and then leave it be.
02:37I gathered the whole of it,
02:39all these old ways of growing more food from the same piece of ground into a book.
02:45You can find it at EliasYoder.com.
02:48The book is the long version.
02:51If you want it, it is there.
02:53I will not mention it again.
02:55The first thing, and this is the one that mystifies most folks,
02:59is understanding how a cucumber makes its fruit at all.
03:03Because it is not like a bean or a tomato, where every flower turns into something you
03:08can eat.
03:09A cucumber carries two different kinds of flowers on the same vine, and until you can tell them
03:15apart, you are working blind.
03:18Go out to your vine and look close, and you will see it plain.
03:22Some of the flowers are just a flower on a stem, a bloom and nothing more behind it.
03:28That is one kind.
03:30But other flowers have a little tiny cucumber attached right behind the bloom,
03:35a small green thing the size of your fingernail,
03:39already shaped like a cucumber before the flower has even opened.
03:43That is the other kind.
03:45Now here is what those mean.
03:47The plain flowers, the ones with nothing behind them, carry the pollen.
03:52The ones with the little cucumber attached,
03:55those are the ones that can become your fruit, but they cannot do it alone.
04:00The pollen from the plain flower has to be carried over to the flower with the little
04:04cucumber behind it.
04:06If that happens, the little cucumber swells and grows, and you eat it.
04:11If it does not happen, that little cucumber turns yellow, shrivels up, and drops off the vine.
04:18And that right there is the answer to a question that has puzzled many a gardener.
04:23If you have ever watched little cucumbers, an inch or two long, go yellow and wither and
04:29fall off, and wondered what disease had struck your plant, I can tell you it was very likely
04:35no disease at all.
04:36It was simply that the pollen never got carried over.
04:40The fruit was never quickened, so the plant let it go.
04:44Same thing happens with your squash and your melons, for they are all cousins, and they
04:49all work this way.
04:50Now, who does the carrying?
04:53The bees.
04:54The bees and the other little creatures that go from bloom to bloom.
04:59That is their work, and they have been doing it since the beginning.
05:03But here is the trouble in our day.
05:05Bees are not so plentiful as they once were, in a great many places.
05:09If your neighborhood is short on bees, then a good deal of your flowers never get their
05:15pollen carried, and a good deal of your little cucumbers wither and drop, and you get a poor
05:21harvest and never know why.
05:24So there are two things to do about it, and both are old, and both are free.
05:29The first is to do the bees' work yourself with your own hand.
05:34It sounds like a fussy business, and it is not.
05:38In the morning, when the flowers are open and fresh, you pick a plain flower, one with
05:44no little cucumber behind it, and you tear the petals back so you have the middle of it
05:49bare in your fingers.
05:50Then you find a flower with a little cucumber behind it, and you touch the one to the other,
05:56gently, right in the center of the bloom, so the dust passes over.
06:02That is all.
06:03You can use a small, soft brush if you like, a little paintbrush, and carry the dust from
06:09the one flower to the other that way, which is tidier.
06:13Go down your row of a morning doing this, and you will have set fruit on near every flower
06:19you touched, where before the bees may have found only half of them.
06:24It takes a few minutes, and it is the surest fruit set you will ever get.
06:30The second thing, and it is the better long answer, is to bring the bees back to your garden.
06:37Plant flowers among your vegetables and along the edges of your beds, the old cottage flowers
06:43that bees love, and do not be so tidy that you leave no blossom anywhere for them.
06:50I keep bees myself, and I will tell you the whole farm is more fruitful for their being
06:56here.
06:56But even a body with no hives can draw the wild bees and the little native bees in, simply
07:04by giving them something to eat all season, and by not poisoning them with sprays.
07:09Feed the bees, and they will work your cucumber patch for free, every morning, without being
07:16asked.
07:17That is the oldest bargain in farming, and it has never been broken.
07:22The second thing to do is get your vines up off the ground.
07:27Grow them upward.
07:29A cucumber is a climbing thing by nature, and it wants to climb, and it does far better up
07:35in the air than sprawled in the dirt.
07:37When a vine lies on the ground, the fruit lies in the dirt and rots on the underside, or the
07:45slugs and the bugs and the mice find it before you do.
07:49The leaves stay damp and close and breed disease.
07:54And you can never find the cucumbers in that tangle, which, as I am about to tell you, is
08:00the very thing that will kill your plant.
08:03Lift them up, and everything gets better.
08:06The fruit hangs clean and straight in the air, where you can see every one of them.
08:12The air moves through the leaves and dries them, and the disease has a harder time taking
08:18hold.
08:18The sun reaches more of the plant, and you can pick standing up instead of crawling on your
08:25knees.
08:25You do not need anything fancy to do this.
08:29A few stout posts with strings run down from a wire or a pole overhead, and you gently tie
08:37or clip the vine to the string as it climbs.
08:41Twine works fine, and old cloth strips and any manner of trellis you can build out of what
08:47you have.
08:48The vine will grab, hold, and climb on its own once it finds something to hold.
08:54Add a tie every foot or so as it goes up, because a vine hung with fruit gets heavy and
09:01will pull itself down if you do not support it.
09:04And do not fret if a vine that has been sprawling on the ground looks kinked and crooked when
09:10you first stand it up.
09:12Give it two or three days in the sun, and it will straighten itself out, reaching for the
09:17light.
09:18A plant knows which way is up.
09:21It only wants the chance.
09:23I have watched a vine that lay flat and twisted on the ground stand itself up straight within
09:29a few days of being lifted onto a string, reaching and climbing as eager as anything, as though
09:36it had been waiting its whole short life for somebody to give it something to hold on to.
09:42Which, I suppose, it had been.
09:45Now the third thing, and I want you to hear me on this one, because this is the single greatest
09:52cucumber secret there is, and it is the one that undoes even good gardeners.
09:58You must never, not once, not ever, let a single cucumber grow old and yellow on the
10:06vine.
10:07Here is why.
10:08That plant is not growing cucumbers for you.
10:12It is growing them to make seed, and once it has made one good ripe, seedy cucumber, it
10:19believes its whole life's work is finished, and then it quits.
10:24The whole vine, every part of it, starts to yellow and slow and die back, and it will
10:31not come back to you.
10:33One single overlooked cucumber, hidden down in the leaves, gone yellow and fat and seedy,
10:40can shut down an entire plant that would otherwise have fed you for another month.
10:45And a cucumber vine is a tangled, leafy, hiding sort of thing.
10:51There is no plant in the garden better at hiding its fruit.
10:56So no matter how careful you are, sooner or later, one of them hides on you, and it swells
11:02up down in there where you cannot see it, and turns yellow, and your plant begins to quit,
11:08and you cannot puzzle out why.
11:10So here is what you do about it, and there are two parts.
11:15First, you pick early, and you pick often.
11:19Every single day, walk your vines and take off every cucumber that is anywhere near a decent
11:26size.
11:27Do not wait for them to get big.
11:30A cucumber is better eating when it is smaller anyhow, more tender, and fewer seeds.
11:36Do not leave one on there because you want to see how big it will get, because that is
11:42exactly the one that will do you in.
11:45Pick them small, pick them daily, and hunt through the leaves with your hands while you
11:51are at it, feeling for the ones that are hiding on you.
11:54Getting your vines up on a trellis, as I just told you, makes this ten times easier, because
12:01you can see them all hanging there.
12:03And the second part is that you plant a fresh crop of cucumbers every few weeks through the
12:10season, so you always have young vines coming on behind.
12:14Because the truth is, even a well-tended cucumber vine has only a couple months of good bearing
12:21in it before it wears itself out.
12:23It is not a plant that lasts.
12:26So you sow a new crop every four to six weeks, right through the summer.
12:32And as one crop wears out, the next is coming into its prime.
12:36And you are never without cucumbers, no matter what mistake you make with one plant.
12:42Always have the next ones coming.
12:44And here is the wonderful thing that comes of picking every day, which is really the flip
12:51side of the same law.
12:52The more you pick, the more it bears.
12:56That plant is trying to make seed.
12:58And every time you take a fruit off before it can make seed, the plant throws out more
13:04blossoms and more fruit trying again.
13:07It cannot help itself.
13:09So a cucumber picked faithfully every day will bear you two and three times what a cucumber
13:17picked lazily every week will bear.
13:20Your diligence is repaid directly in fruit.
13:24There is a lesson in that beyond the garden, I think.
13:28Which brings me to the fourth thing.
13:30If you are picking that hard, you must feed that hard.
13:35You are taking a great deal off that plant, day after day, and asking it to keep making
13:41more.
13:42And it cannot make something out of nothing.
13:45A cucumber picked daily is a hungry, hard-working plant.
13:50And if you do not feed it well, it will start to weaken and sicken and quit on you, no
13:57matter
13:57how faithfully you pick.
13:59So feed them, and feed them regular.
14:02Rich compost worked into the ground where they grow, well-rotted manure that is the foundation
14:08of it.
14:09Then, through the season while they are bearing, feed them along, every week or two, with something
14:15gentle and steady.
14:16A weak manure tea.
14:18A drink of compost tea.
14:20Some bone meal scratched in around them for the blooming and the fruit.
14:24Whatever you have of the good rotted stuff.
14:27And if you are growing your cucumbers in a container or a bag rather than the open ground,
14:33you must feed even more often, every week or so, because a plant in a container has only
14:39the little world you gave it to eat from, and a hard rain washes the goodness right out
14:44the bottom.
14:45The open ground holds its feeding better.
14:48So judge by how you are growing and how hard it rains on you.
14:53But the principle stands.
14:55Give back to that plant what you are taking from it.
14:58It is only fair, and it is the only way it can keep giving.
15:03And while we are speaking of what a cucumber wants, let me add the water, for it belongs
15:09with the feeding.
15:10A cucumber is mostly water, as you can taste for yourself, and it wants a steady, even drink.
15:17Not a flood one day and a drought the next.
15:20When the watering goes uneven, feast and famine, you get cucumbers that come out crooked and pinched
15:27and misshapen, and worse, you get cucumbers that go bitter on you.
15:32And a bitter cucumber is a sad thing after all that work.
15:36So water them deep, and water them regular, especially once the fruit is swelling, and
15:42keep a good blanket of mulch over the ground around them to hold that moisture even.
15:48Steady water, steady feeding.
15:51A cucumber is not a complicated creature.
15:54It only wants to be treated regular.
15:57And the fifth thing, and this one surprises folks, is to give your cucumbers some shade
16:03in the fiercest part of the summer.
16:05Now I know I have told you to plant them in good sun, and that is true, and in the
16:10spring
16:11and early summer, they will love it.
16:13But when the real heat of high summer comes on, that hard beating sun and that terrible
16:19heat, a cucumber suffers under it.
16:22The leaves curl and burn.
16:24The plant wilts even when the soil is damp.
16:28It drops its blossoms and quits setting fruit, because a cucumber will not set well in a brutal
16:34heat, no matter what else you do right.
16:37And a plant beaten down like that falls to disease easy.
16:41So in that worst stretch, put a bit of shade over them.
16:45A length of shade cloth stretched on hoops over the bed, giving maybe 40% shade, will make
16:51a remarkable difference.
16:53The plants stay cooler, they wilt less, they need less water, they keep setting fruit, and
17:00they will live and bear months longer than they would have out in the naked sun.
17:05Now, if you live up north, where the summer is mild, and the sun never gets truly savage,
17:11you may not need it at all, and that is fine.
17:14But down south, or out west, or anywhere the summer sun is a hammer, a bit of cloth over
17:21your cucumbers, is one of the cheapest, wisest things you can do.
17:25It costs little, it lasts for years, and it pays you back in water saved, and in fruit
17:32you would otherwise never have picked.
17:35Let me say a plain word about who profits from you not knowing this, because it is worth
17:40understanding, and there is no villain in it.
17:43Not one of the five things I have told you costs a dollar.
17:47Carrying pollen with your own finger of a morning costs nothing.
17:52String and twine for a trellis, near nothing.
17:56Picking every day costs nothing but your time.
18:00Compost and manure you can make yourself.
18:03A bit of cloth for shade, once, and it lasts 10 years.
18:08There is no product to sell in any of this, and so no one advertises it, and no one teaches
18:14it, and the knowing quietly thins out with each generation, while the store goes on selling
18:20cucumbers to folks who have a vine in the yard that quit in July for want of five plain things
18:26nobody told them.
18:28It is not a scheme.
18:29It is only that no one earns a wage by handing you a harvest for free.
18:35The money runs the other way, and always has.
18:38So there are your five.
18:40Learn your two kinds of flower, and carry the pollen yourself when the bees are scarce.
18:45Get your vines up off the ground and into the air.
18:49Never once let a cucumber grow yellow and seedy on the vine, and pick early and daily, and
18:55plant a fresh crop every few weeks.
18:58Feed them heavy, for you are taking heavy, and shade them in the worst of the summer heat.
19:03Do those five things, and I promise you, you will be carrying cucumbers to your neighbors
19:09in a basket, and wondering what on earth to do with them all.
19:13And when that day comes, and it will come, do not let a one of them go to waste.
19:19That is the whole point of growing more than you need.
19:22The old people never stood in a kitchen full of cucumbers, wringing their hands.
19:27They put them up.
19:28A crock of brine, a jar of pickles, and that summer glut becomes something you eat in February,
19:34when the ground outside is frozen hard, and there is not a green thing growing anywhere.
19:41Give the extras to your neighbors, surely, for that is a fine thing, and it comes back
19:46to you.
19:47But put up what you can, because a cucumber picked in July and eaten in the dead of winter
19:53is one of the quiet triumphs of a well-run household, and there is a deep satisfaction
19:58in it that I cannot fully put into words.
20:02The abundance is not the end of the work.
20:04It is the beginning of the keeping.
20:07Tell me down in the comments what county you garden in, and how your cucumbers have done
20:12for you, and whether you have ever had a plant quit on you early and never knew why, because
20:18I suspect a good many of you now know exactly what happened.
20:22And if your family had an old way with cucumbers I have not named here, put it down there so
20:28we can all learn it.
20:29Next time out here, I want to show you how to build a proper compost pile the old way,
20:35layer upon layer, so that you make your own black crumbly gold to feed these hungry vines
20:41with, and never have to buy a bag of anything.
20:45A cucumber picked every day is a hungry plant, and that pile is how you feed it for free.
20:51But for now, remember this.
20:54A cucumber is not a stingy plant.
20:56It is one of the most generous things that grows, and it will pour out fruit until you
21:02beg it to stop, if you only keep the few plain rules it lives by.
21:07The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting
21:12to remember it.
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